Bon Iver sez: “Sweet hook-up.”

A quick summary, even if you’re not still wondering “Who the fuck is Bon Iver?”…

This November, the Recording Academy nominated the very deserving Bon Iver for an astounding four Grammys: Record of the Year, Song of the Year, Best Alternative Music Album, and Best New Artist. In December, Vernon said some tough things in a New York Times interview about his reaction to being nominated:

I would get up there and be like, “This is for my parents, because they supported me,” because I know they would think it would be stupid of me not to go up there. But I kinda felt like going up there and being like: “Everyone should go home, this is ridiculous. You should not be doing this. We should not be gathering in a big room and looking at each other and pretending that this is important.”

The Grammys made him into a poster and dropped his nominated song into a commercial, to which he responded:

There’s a big misunderstanding–I don’t want to sell music. But if people are going to be selling music, and they want to sell our music without disturbing the medium of what it actually is, we want to fucking do that. I want people to hear the music that we make. I don’t want to do it in any shitty way.

He was asked to perform on the Grammys with some of his *ahem* peers and not-so-respectfully declined, according to an interview with Billboard:

We wanted to play our music, but we were told that we couldn’t play. We had to do a collaboration with someone else. And we just felt like it was such a large stage. We’re getting nominated for this record that we made, me and Brian [Joseph] and a bunch of our fucking friends, and we were given accolades for it. And all of a sudden we were being asked to play music that had nothing to do with that. We kind of said ‘fuck you’ a little bit and they sort of acted like they wanted us to play, but I don’t think they wanted us to play… “Fuckin’ rock n’ roll should not be decided by people that have that job. Rock n’ roll should be the fucking people with guitars around their backs. And their friends. And their managers.”

Then he actually won two Grammys, threw up his hands, kissed his mother, and had this to say:

I’m struggling with how I feel about this whole string of events. Justin Vernon definitely wants to sell music. He makes a living off of his music. He just started his own record label (Jagjaguwar imprint Chigliak), which is, as I understand it, a type of business that sells (or at least tries to sell) music. Artists need money to pay the bills they incur while making their art. That’s why they sell music for Miller Genuine Draft commercials and pose for Bushmills ad campaigns. No earnest artist wants to prostitute one’s work; there’s also nothing wrong with being rewarded for art that moves people. That’s the goal. Repeat the mantra: started out hustlin’, ended up ballin’.

I understand Vernon’s reservations about the work and intention of the Recording Academy. At worst, the awards and festivities feel like a circle jerk (how masturbatory was the final performance with Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Dave Grohl, et al trading licks over the end of “The End”?). At best, the honorary nods turn due congratulations into ham-fisted production cheese (like the Beach Boys tribute) and the underdog award recipients feel like vessels for the Recording Academy to penetrate into the hearts and minds of a younger, hipper audience (think Radiohead’s OK Computer or Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs). The very idea of “bestness” in music is pretty bizarre. But why do the Grammys catch all the flack while certain notable Top 50 lists also giving Bon Iver top honors escape unscathed.

Who said you have to be trying to win an award when you make music that’s nominated for a Grammy? It’s an important moment when someone is rewarded for making music that somehow manages to catch enough peoples’ attention that the Recording Academy–whose voters have momentarily escaped being steamrolled by the music industry machine into thinking the amount of money people put into making and selling a record can be a standard by which they evaluate quality–choose to celebrate something that’s surprised and moved them. There’s no shame in being grateful for and gracious with the honor–it is an honor. That there are a ton of excellent musicians that don’t get the respect they deserve goes without saying. So I kind of feel like Vernon pissed on his own moment (because he should be excited about winning that award, for goodness’ sake!) and on a tremendously unique opportunity (because he didn’t articulate his complaints).

If you’re offered the chance to have thirty seconds where the industry you critique must listen to what you have to say, if you’re still given the podium after you’ve shit on them in the press over the months leading up to the event, I feel like you should be better prepared to deliver a clear message. I see that notecard in his hand. He clearly feels like he could not freestyle a thoughtful acceptance speech on stage in front of “a lot of talent in this room” he’d badmouthed. But there’s something missing, given all those quotes. On that stage, at that moment, Vernon could have articulated a position instead of merely suggesting something to an audience of insiders who are so inside they’re outside of the rest of the music world. He owes it to independent music, sure. But he also kind of owes it to the Recording Academy, whose membership nominated and voted for him, who clearly are not entirely seduced by the glitz and flash on the red carpet, who appear to have some level of interest in being more progressive about what they award and why, who may just be hoping–after he spilled the beans to such widely circulated media outlets as the New York Times and Billboard–Vernon ponies up and says what’s on their mind, something like:

This is an incredibly unexpected honor. But as flattered as I am, to be perfectly honest, I feel kind of uncomfortable accepting it. A Grammy has never seemed like a very definitive or even educated judgment about quality music. Especially in my case. Because I would have made this album even if I hadn’t collaborated with Kanye West. But I seriously doubt I’d be accepting this award right now if I hadn’t. So this is kind of an accidental coup, because I’m basically an interloper on an independent label crashing an event designed to promote major label music. And while I’m tremendously moved that my music has reached such a large audience that I could be considered for this award, what I really want to do is dedicate it to a very large population of incredibly talented people making important, beautiful music at this moment who are not ever going to be represented in this forum because people in suits and offices don’t think they can make millions of dollars off of them.

Or something like that. So, yeah, I’d like to see a do-over. But it’s a little late now: Bon Iver went home with two Grammys Sunday night. And I’m thankful for that, even if he’s not.

“I like to believe I do art because I have to do it—it’s like vomit.”
Willis Earl Beal, Credit: Michael Boyd / Chicago Reader

That’s Willis Earl Beal, this guy in Chicago who’s about to release his first album on XL Imprint Hot Charity in April.  He has an intense outsider sort of backstory (you know you’ve hit the obscurity jackpot when your first big exposure comes in Found magazine). He doesn’t even  have a Bandcamp or Soundcloud (!), and what has surfaced of his recordings sounds sounds like long-lost practice tapes with clanky percussion and waterlogged guitars.  It’s awesome, and for anyone who’s spent hours huddled around tape recorders or laptop mics  just happy to get stuff down on tape before it vanishes into thin air, it’s like a siren call from the past — when expectations were low, magic happened in real time instead of being wrestled from DAW editing tools, and things were real.  

It brings up a long obsession for lots of us with busted up recordings so gnarly they seem like they can’t be lying.

There’s a certain moment in life when a listener is suddenly fine with hearing shitty audio quality.  For most of our formative years, we spend the days listening to what’s on the radio, at the club, drifting through TV shows, blasting durin movies, whatever. We get used to the idea that the results of super expensive methods of recording are the standard for how to hear things.

Eventually, you get to hear something some talentless soul recorded on his or her own.  This is easy now that anyone can put up any recording they feel like all over the internet but, even in the prehistoric days, we all had tape recorders growing up and our parents had big reel-to-reel doo-dads before that.  Eventually you were exposed to it, and the first time you heard it I think we can agree that you probably hated it.

It sounds really bad.  It gets all fuzzy on the loud parts and blows out the speaker and these unexplained ghost waves of dissonance trail the held out notes.  Bands are even worse, usually coming across as a racket so smeared and useless that no right-minded person would sit through more than 30 seconds of it.

But step onto the other side of this equation and it’s like putting on Roddy Piper’s magic Ray-Bans. Once you’ve recorded yourself in the garage – once you’ve been behind the scenes – you know that terrible washing sound is the cymbals.  The warbled moan is the artifact of what seemed like a captivating singer at the time.  It all makes sense. You listen to it over and over.  It’s one of the most exciting things ever.   You put it on your shelf next to a dubbed Guns’n’Roses tape and don’t even bat an eye.

I was in a band that did this, of course.  We recorded onto an old cassette deck. For vocals, we figured out that we could plug an old pair of ‘70s headphones into a keyboard amp and yell into them.  We recorded ten songs. We brought them to a friend who was a drummer and played the tape for him and he looked at us in horror.  “I don’t even know where the drum beat is in this,” he said.  I was baffled.

In any case, it’s an acquired taste, but it doesn’t go away. It’s like learning how to ride a bike, with broken brake cables.  And so you move on bravely equipped to pick up people’s bad demos, practice recordings, and bootleg live tapes and parse them for treasures the way mycologists dig around in dank woods teeming with rabid grizzly bears for choice mushrooms while the rest of us are fine with the dealies in the Styrofoam trays.

This was just news on CNN:  scientists cleaned up what is possibly the oldest audio recording ever, made in 1878 by a French scientist named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville on a thing called “the phonautogram.”   On it, he’s singing “Clair de lune” in what sounds like an extremely depressed stupor, but who knows.  The recording is muddy and scratchy and barely decipherable and amazing.  In all of his research and fundraising and engineering while believing he was doing one of the most high-tech things ever, Scott de Martinville basically made the world’s first lo-fi single.

Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville – Claire de Lune

There’s been a lot written about “lo-fi” as a genre, mostly since Lou Barlow started kicking it (about 115 years later) with a four-track in some Northampton apartment and Robert Pollard stumbled toward a boozy record button in Dayton.  But in its essence, talking about this method (or lack of method) in the greater context of stuff flying around the internet can drain what’s cool from it.  And that is: shitty recordings serve a great, unfathomable, and maybe even holy purpose that (hopefully now) goes beyond getting stuff up on a Tumblr as fast as possible.

In charting the waters of great, poorly recorded music, you’d have to make two categories — those that make straight ahead attempts to record a single, honest performance (think the lifelong catalog of Jandek or maybe a weird uncle of yours), and those that flail about with tape-cutting and handfisted multi-tracking like a punk making flyers out of safety scissors and Scotch tape. Both can rule, both can sound hamfisted and corny. The first category probably yields the most nostalgic examples.

Daniel Johnston – Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Your Grievances

Daniel Johnston is the classic example and still maybe the best.  Hopefully you’ve seen the Devil and Daniel Johnston documentary, which is my favorite music film ever. Johnston made tapes one at a time on a pump organ (later guitar) in his house in Austin.  The tape recorder would sit on the top of the organ and Johnston would sing and play right into it.  On the recording, pretty much the loudest thing was the actual percussive sound of the keys getting punched over and over.  I mean it doesn’t sound very good and good luck listening to this in a car, but Johnston is too charming to not love it. His weird version of mental unbalance and honest, earnest songwriting make this stuff essential. The feeling is that he made the tape just for you (in some cases he did – stories go that he’d sometimes run out of copies to dub and would just record the whole thing again in the earliest days).

The Mountain Goats – Maize Stalk Drinking Blood

John Darnielle followed in those footsteps in the first long phase of the Mountain Goats, churning out piles of boombox dispatches from bedrooms in the late ‘90s.  Darnielle was no Daniel Johnston – he writes tense, skittish songs packed with dense, self-aware lyrics with literary allusions and obscure proper nouns. He doesn’t have quite as much of that mad genius thing going that lends itself so much to this kind of . . . format.  Still, the overall tinny blastedness of hearing Darnielle blaze through emotional manifestos over a beat-up acoustic guitar there in cassette tape oblivion is pretty a righteous experience.  He eventually developed a career out of it and started making decent-sounding recordings that weren’t as memorable, but not really any worse.  He could afford it, they sounded fine, why not?

Frank Black is a guy who’s not really ever championed lo-fi approaches to things – just check the admittedly lame-sounding gated drums on most of the Pixies albums, ouch – but he has had a pretty can-do attitude about covering everything in a song by himself.  My first live-streaming video experience is watching Frank do a low-rent web interview through AOL where he broke a string and looked into the camera and remarked, “Can you imagine a parent walking in  their kid staring at this right now?  Some guy in bad lighting fixing his guitar string?  They’re probably horrified.” Check this very old TV interview where he shows off his contentedness to just hum the lead guitar parts while Joey Santiago is off doing who knows what. Probably wasn’t even told about the interview.

When the Pixies reformed early on last decade,  someone at SpinArt (or Frank himself) had the sweet idea of releasing all the solo acoustic drafts of what would become the first three Pixies album that Frank recorded in 1986. He did it like that video — all alone in a room (right in my old neighborhood of Allston!) with a guitar and himself howling guitar parts and bass parts, sometimes giving little asides.  It’s kind of thrilling to hear, only the mastering dude put some quite cheesy reverb on the whole for I don’t know what purpose. Are we fooled into thinking a recording is more polished if it sounds as if it were dropped into a fake cave?  It would have been pretty magical, documentary-style finding is kind of turned into one of those blurry-vision dramatization segments out of Unsolved Mysteries.  Frank probably wouldn’t mind that comparison, actually. (This isn’t up on the internet for whatever reason)

On the other side lies knob-twiddling, button-mashing, sputtering-mic cable type of records typified by Sebadoh. Sebadoh III is kind of the classic, but my own personal benchmark for this approach, I guess, is that opium warped mess of John Frusciante’s Niandra Ladies and Usually Just a T-Shirt.

The idea with this record (and which might be more romanticized than the real thing) is that it’s a bunch of garbled four-track recordings he released after leaving the Chili Peppers and getting strung out on heroin.  That’s the story that usually gets handed along to you if you have a friend force this one on you, like I did, and when you listen to the thing, it’s hard not to believe it:

John Frusciante – Head (Beach Arab)

This record slays, although its insanity is probably due a bit more to Frusciante’s conscious decisions about recording — guitars probably straight in, no effects other than that delay pedal and maybe some toying with the Tape Speed controls (though who am I to say?) — and he’s gone on record as saying most of this stuff was recorded before he even left the band.  Right after Blood Sugar Sex Magik was recorded, actually.  So maybe the connection to any drug-fueled turmoil isn’t even that authentic, which is kind of a let-down (but also kind of a win for artistic expression, right)? In the end, the record channels some gut level stuff anyway.

Then there’s kind of the best stuff — unearthed working demos. This is stuff that people were never meant to hear anyway, and it seems like there are often all kinds of weird glimpses into creative process and emotions that went into the creation through these.  The Beatles obviously sold boatloads of this kind of thing when they put out those Anthologies in the ’90s, despite the fact that it’s hard to imagine most people sitting around jamming to three unfinished takes in a row of “Strawberry Fields Forever.”

PJ Harvey released her 4-Track Demos as the clamor over Rid of Me was dying down and her band had broken up. It was pretty rad — self-recorded versions of the same stuff from Rid of Me with a few bonuses – and some critics were even into it more than the real deal. Or maybe this was the real deal. I don’t know.  It’s possibly the only time Steve Albini, who recorded the studio version, has ever been accused of overproducing anything.

PJ Harvey – Reeling (4-Track Demos)

Another good example is the nasty-sound collection of demos that surfaced in the early ’90s for Tom Waits’s Alice project, which at that point was only known as a musical going down in German which no one in America would ever see.  Who knows what kind of backstabbing ninja studio work went into sneaking this out the bootleggers of the time, but here it is.  In this particularly rough one, it basically sounds like some rough instrumental rhythm work was laid down and then Tom took a tape recorder along in his car while he made up words on the spot.

Tom Waits – What Became Of Old Father Craft

Basically, it’s great.

A question for now is: where are our true lo-fi, diamond in the rough recordings?  There are tons of badly produced homespun stuff out there now, graduating from MySpace pages to SoundClouds and Bandcamps everywhere and burstin from the remains of the Altered Zones blog like pesky allergens. WAVVES nailed the fried 4-track sound right out of the gates, but even then it sort of sounds affected (not exactly in a bad way, but not in a “Gee, this was made just for me” way, either). Ditto like everything else (first Grizzly Bear record, early Ariel Pink, Times New Viking, Kurt Vile records). Suggestions here are super welcome, by the way.

But then there’s Willis Earl Beal:

Willis Earl Beal – Take Me Away

And you realize that things are still awesome.

But if you need to have some guy come along on a blog and tell you where to find the hot real “authentic” lo-fi stuff, you’re probably not looking very hard.  Convince your friends to record themselves making stuff up.  There’s a good chance they don’t know what they’re doing and the whole thing will come off totally honest.  In the end, the entire authenticity of the shitty recording might just have to do with an underdog, ground level feeling similar to when you see a band onstage at a tiny rock club with no soundguy and blown speakers.  Maybe that’s just the fable we like to tell ourselves, but it hits home, right?  There’s a quote attributed to Kim Gordon, who’s seen a few lifetimes’ worth of dumpy shows, that goes something like , “When we go to rock concerts, we pay to see people believing in themselves.”  We want to believe the people making records like this — like Johnston, like Willis, like Jandek — are doing it because they have no other choice. What we’re buying into is a good old sense of duty, maybe some desperation, and maybe a just little faith in themselves.

(Note to self and exhausted readers wondering what was the point — these posts should not be this long in the future).

Of Montreal uses two basses regularly enough to tour with two bass players–it’s not just a recording trick. Sometimes one deep bass carries a more traditional line while another trebly bass adds a percussive motion to the arrangement. Hard evidence is the best: Around the 1:00 mark of this appearance on Letterman, we see one playing a bouncy melody high on the neck while the other rides a steadier rhythm in a lower register.

Elsewhere in that song, they remain in the same range, playing counterpoint lines. Here’s a clearer recording of the approach from one of my favorite Of Montreal songs, “Bunny Ain’t No Kind of Rider.”

Of Montreal – Bunny Ain’t No Kind of Rider

In the intro, the basses play little harmony licks to set the pace. During the verses, one bass leads the way panned center. But when the chorus breakdown arrives, two basses are now panned opposite each other, their harmony carrying the progression until the full arrangement returns. It’s a fun character that might be accomplished more often with keyboards than basses. But why put those Rickenbackers to waste? Of Montreal mastermind Kevin Barnes is such a diabolical composer, it’s no wonder he’s leading the charge with this technique–it’s yet another way to further conjure his music’s fractured psyche.

Shall we talk about panning some more? It’s common practice on recordings to use two takes of the same guitar part simultaneously, panning one to the right and one to the left. It fills out the sound and helps define the stereo field. On the other hand, because low frequencies need more energy to be propagated, recording engineers typically pan basses and kick drums dead center, so that the work is split between two speakers. All over Spoon‘s most recent album, Transference, the wily recordists in the band subvert that wisdom, doubling bass parts and panning each far opposite the other.

Spoon – Nobody Gets Me But You

Hard evidence is only the best when it’s still available–apparently the great performance of this song on Jimmy Fallon with The Roots‘s rhythm section playing along has been eradicated from the internet. But you get the gist. It’s crystal clear through headphones. We have two unique performances of the same part in the same song with the same instrument, which isn’t that unusual…except when it’s the bass guitar. It’s particularly ear-catching for long-time Spoon fans because it inverts the formula they began with: Britt Daniel’s guitar and Jim Eno’s drums. Instead, a distant, thin guitar deep in our left ear jangles away as if it’s just playing along with someone else’s recording, and a drum machine leads the way while overdubbed live drum patterns appear mostly just to ratchet up the energy here and there. All the while the parallel bass sandwiches the track along. Over the years, Spoon have gone from giving the bass a very small role to making it the key element in their ever-sparser arrangements. As a melodic rhythm instrument, it frees the guitar and drums to interpret more. “Nobody Gets Me But You” takes the shift to a new extreme, magnifying what they highlighted in Gimme Fiction‘s “I Turn My Camera On” with a sly wink from Daniel’s lyrics: “Do you get me?”

Deserved Grammy nominee Bon Iver is far more known for folkloric acoustic guitars and indie autotune than for his work in the rhythm section. On his lo-fi contribution to the two-disc compilation, Dark Was the Night, Justin Vernon serves up a track composed nearly entirely on the bass guitar.

Bon Iver – Brackett, WI

The bass arrangement on this gorgeous and obtusely timed song hybridizes the two approaches above. The basses, in a higher register, panned far opposite each other, define the progression with their harmonies. And while Justin Vernon works his sublime lyrics with that choirized falsetto, he points to his centerpiece instruments with the chorus’ clearest words. Digging low along the edges of the sound, tapping along the mathematical pattern under passing scenes and somber memories, the pair of basses are suddenly sucked out and replaced by tense acoustic guitars for the confessional reveal: “So I’m counting on your fingers ’cause you’ve reattached the twitch. And if you want opinion, I will die along the ditches.” Que suave.

Lil’ Wayne – La La (featuring Brisco and Busta Rhymes)

That’s the dream, right? To build something from nothing? To grind your fingers to the bone and find them on the flesh of something pulsing?

Among the industries that have thrived in the internet boom, music blogs and ambitious musicians have invested boatloads of energy and expense looking to hit the buzz jackpot. And while there are plenty of opportunities to do so in the lightspeed-paced web-news cycle, we often forget just how much hard work and luck go into lasting success. While everyone’s out looking for the right recipe, inquiring minds want to know: Who in the hell is feeding you or paying for that data plan you’re log-jamming all day long? The internet is a lottery full of gamblers looking to cop a Keno-sized bandwidth bonanza. At the end of the day, satisfaction is about doing what you love however you can manage.

Diamond Igloo is, for the most part, a group of musicians who have given it their best shot and are satisfied giving it good shots these days. We’ve been there (mostly) and done that (kind of) and we definitely do not have a closet of gold bullion and platinum frisbees to show for it. We make music and we love music nevertheless. So we’re offering just that.

In our archives, you’ll encounter pieces we’ve written that have floated around the internets and have found their home here, a number of which are inherited from the retiree blog The Cadillac of Winter. The original Diamond Igloo was also a recording clearinghouse of sorts, so you’ll see a number of listings for past releases. We’ll probably continue to release music because that’s a forum we would like to be. But for the most part, we’ll be talking about other people’s music.

We won’t be thoroughly compiling the hits of the day up to the minute. We’ll be writing pieces about things that move us or upset us or demand some kind of consideration beyond file-sharing and juke-tubing. We may have a mild Boston music scene bias because that’s where we live and it’s filled with the people we know, people making good music, music we’ll be proselytizing when inspired. We hope you like what we have to say. If you don’t, I’m sure we’ll hear about it. The internet is everywhere.

We started off hustling. We ended up blogging. Welcome to Diamond Igloo.

The longer we slow to look at the flashing red and blue lights, to inspect the mangled chassis, to peek into the rear of the ambulance–the longer I dwell on all of the unsettling and disturbing and captivating issues–the more I want to take up the cause of the policeman waving cars on their merry way:

“There’s nothing to see here people. Move along.”

It’s not that easy, is it? Forgive me while I synthesize…

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NOVELTY ACT

Sure, their appearance on Jimmy Fallon is up there in the category of “Best Things to Happen on Television Since the Kanye Rant after Katrina.” Clearly, this moment and these firebrands caught everyone off-guard. But tell me you haven’t seen bands that wouldn’t have wilded out like that if given the opportunity to perform on late night television. Tell me you’re not a little ashamed of being sucked into the novelty: “Surprise America! Rappers aren’t always wooden thugs! Sometimes they’re crazed youth with tube socks!”

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LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Now, NPR is on their jock acting like naive parents who think they can convince their kids they’re cool by turning their friends onto their kids’ music:

“You know what else? They’re really good. Especially their ringleader, called Tyler The Creator. And another thing? It’s awesome to see them play live.”

Are you fucking kidding me? You couldn’t invent a better parody of NPR’s tagalong music staff. The New York Times does a little better, but they celebrate the music and describe the disturbing content while essentially giving Tyler, the Creator a pass because of hard times. Word to hard times. But hard times don’t get a pass. They get a moment, some space, a solemn acknowledgement. We do not give hard times license and we do not get to wash our hands when others fall on them.

As for Pitchfork, they’ve got me on some “Fear of an Eight Point Oh” maths: a 20-minute edit DNE a 2.0 deduction when the bulk of said edit is wretched music.
As I began working on this post last Monday, Pitchfork, reporting statements by Sara Quin of Tegan and Sara challenging the press and fans to take a stand on OFWGKTA, went all “Just the facts, Ma’am” and dropped an old Tegan and Sara video. Come on, dudes! Grow a pair! Tyler, the Creator’s “If Tegan And Sara Need Some Hard Dick, Hit Me Up!” response deserves more than your “predictably fucked up” shoulder shrug!

Everyone is writing about it because it’s a spectacle, because there’s some new outlandish addition to the news cycle every time they pop up on the internet or break something on stage or bleed some member of the audience. The music media is feeding off of their network for web traffic. #OFWGKTA is great advertising.

Meanwhile, OFWGKTA are telling us we don’t get it. And they’re right. We don’t get it. We shouldn’t get it. We’re entertaining it because we want to be hip to the zeitgeist. We’ve been seduced by energy. And we’re accountable.

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TYLER

At present, this movement is all about Tyler, the Creator. And, sadly, what was disarmingly charming about him in that first network television takeover is exactly what’s missing in his new album: piggy back rides. Goblin is not remotely fun music. It is dark and angry and unwelcoming, even more universally unpleasant than the “rapey” and “homophobic” descriptions would lead one to believe. Essentially a rehash of the format of the first album, Bastard, it bears only a handful of legitimately compelling tracks, one of which is the leadoff single, “Yonkers.”

Tyler, the Creator – Yonkers

Everything else is lazy production, artless vitriol, pedestrian shock schlock, incessant insults to its listeners, and songs that appear designed as an exercise to see how many times someone can use “bitch” in his lyrics. The two worst offenders simply seem like antagonistic joke tunes, one of which doesn’t even feature Tyler’s rapping:

Tyler, the Creator with Jasper the Dolphin and Taco Bennett – Bitch Suck Dick

Tyler is not without talent. He has a particular minimal production aesthetic that is occasionally quite moving. He has an incredible rap voice and great cadence and delivery. There are fascinating moments on Bastard.

Tyler, the Creator with Hodgy Beats – French!

The problem now is that he’s all id and venom for every detractor and supporter and bystander equally. While that may be captivating for the time being, it’s not something that sustains great art; it’s what alienates foes and fans alike.

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THERAPY

The stories of Bastard and Goblin are apparently two of three sessions with Tyler’s pitch-dropped therapist character. He’s clearly troubled and aware of it. He’s ironic about treatment while admitting its importance. His sudden rise to fame gives him more fuel for the fire. No matter how much we’d like to see him harness his talent and forego the upsetting content, I don’t know how a fan base can possibly facilitate rehabilitation. For him, the music is therapeutic. And thankfully, most of these intense songs are among Tyler’s most memorable performances.

Tyler, the Creator – Bastard
Tyler, the Creator – Nightmare

But when does therapy go too far? Where do we draw the line when outlets for angst and rage force themselves upon others? It’s not a tenable relationship for listeners to give such leeway or for artists to expect so much.

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FRANK

At the end of Goblin Tyler reveals that his pitch-dropped therapist character is actually his conscience. The irony is that OFWGKTA’s conscience really is built into itself. Their lone R&B croon slinger (who should keep singing and stop rapping), Frank Ocean, manages to be consistently on the surprising side of all the talking points. Take, for example, the track “We All Try”, in which Ocean actually lists principles instead of making ruins:

Frank Ocean – We All Try

“I believe a woman’s temple gives her the right to choose.
But, baby, don’t abort.
I believe that marriage isn’t between a man and woman
But between love and love…
You must believe in something.
You’ve gotta believe in something.
I still believe in man…
I just don’t believe we’re wicked.
I know that we sin.
But I do believe we try.
We all try.”

The moral is precisely what makes us sympathize with Tyler. Look at that big, goofy smile. Most of us are Platonists: everyone starts out good and is merely corrupted. There has to be some good reason for Tyler to behave that way. There is, of course, his troubled relationship with his father, the anger from which is entirely legitimate. But here the comparison continues. Consider Frank Ocean’s take on being fatherless:

Frank Ocean – There Will Be Tears

Frank clearly has a different relationship with his feelings than his cohorts, of whom we imagine him singing: “These boys had no fathers neither. And they ain’t crying.” Instead of Tyler’s oft-quoted “I just want my father’s email so I can tell him how much I fucking hate him in detail,” Frank cries for his loss, even in the company of guarded friends.

Beyond these comparisons, the real dividing line between the two artists is Tyler’s absolutely abhorrent language regarding women. In Frank Ocean’s music, sexuality can be difficult and complicated without being abusive or misogynistic. The highlight of nostalgia, ultra, “Songs for Women,” shows the kind of vulnerability one can be found in where romantic feelings are involved.

Frank Ocean – Songs for Women

So we’re presented with the paradox of membership. In this celebrated and maligned collective are two individuals who appear to profess very different world views who create very different music. Yet they work and operate together quite intimately. How does Frank Ocean sit and where does he stand with all of this? Or Tyler, for that matter?

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FOR VIOLENCE

There is something deep and primal about the appeal of OFWGKTA. By the time they surfaced, the gun raps of pop gangsters (as well as their club lives and sexual escapades, which OFWGKTA similarly mock) had grown utterly tiresome, mundane, unmoving, unthreatening. Yet a large part of what is attractive in rap music is its threatening character. We love to feel equally dangerous and endangered. We cannot ignore the success of OFWGKTA as evidence of an extensive desire for violent content (musical or lyrical) that isn’t so bored and commonplace that it’s dismissed outright as fantasy. What we’re seeing here is a fan base that is exhilarated by merely wondering whether Tyler, the Creator is really a rapist. The adrenaline of violence, the passion for conquest, the simultaneous desire for both survival and extinction–these are triggered by the music, which resonates on a level of instinct beyond both morals and aesthetics.

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AGAINST VIOLENCE

But the violence is clearly generational too. I revisit a quote from Blood Meridian that’s been inspiring a good deal of my next album:

“For it is the death of the father to which the son is entitled and to which he is heir, more so than his goods. He will not hear of the small mean ways that tempered the man in life. He will not see him struggling in follies of his own devising. No. The world which he inherits bears him false witness. He is broken before a frozen god and he will never find his way.”

OFWGKTA are bastards in a more fundamental way than by just a lack of a father. Each new generation scrapes and claws for its footing in the world, against the world as it is, a world that is against its young, Saturn devouring his children. Generation Z have transformed the very nature of identity in a sociopsychological transmutation that suffers the physical world as a platform to explorations of a boundless cyberspace. It is too much science fiction for us. And too real to absorb. We are alien to the future. And so, we are to be destroyed.

The repeated acts of rape and the frequent use of the term “faggot” that are employed in this campaign are indeed disgusting and reprehensible. They are also circumstantial. Nothing menaces femininity and masculinity, respectively, in a more potent manner than this act and this insult. We are to be shaken from our foundations. Our false witness is to be purged.

Still, these kids aren’t anything like the gang in Graham Greene’s The Destructors, who would coldly and methodically dismantle the teetering edifice of the tired, old world. These are teenagers. I can remember how I felt being a teenager and I didn’t have much wrong with my life. We were “fuck all” too. OFWGKTA aren’t entirely far off. By which I mean, I don’t think they even get it. They’re too much blindly flailing about at the spectre of adulthood. Whatever intelligence these kids employ (and there is intelligence) is still not developed enough to give them all the credit for meta-commentary they’ve been showered with.

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ONLY ONE SWEATSHIRT

Lesser members like Hodgy Beats and Left Brain may continue to play with firearms. But it’s no mere coincidence that OFWGKTA’s most talented rapper traffics in the menace of hands-on violence unmediated by guns, in mortal combat at close distances with knives and blunt instruments, in unsettlingly painterly visions: Earl Sweatshirt.

In Earl’s instance, NPR’s directive is indeed worthwhile, though you shouldn’t be listening to the words themselves at all. Take but a few moments to hear the sound of Earl’s language and encounter a surpassingly smooth, round wordplay, easily gliding through vocabulary with an understanding of the palatable feeling of language, refreshing and textured, like chewing a wet sponge on a liquid-free diet. Consider what I believe to be the finest moment of the entire OFWGKTA ouvre:

Earl Sweatshirt – Stapleton

This track encompasses the highest highs and the lowest lows of the collective. The lurching beat is both incredibly disorienting and transcendently moving. The verses are disciplined, thematic, formalized. The chorus is vivid and utterly terrifying, the words of a deranged screen villain delivered with a jarring, cinematic effect:

“Tell your boyfriend that’s a bat and it’s a migraine.
Don’t ask why my jean’s splattered with these white stains.
Wait! Where you going? What you doing tonight?
Stop running. I just want to know what you’re doing.
Come back. Please?”

It’s chilling. Meanwhile, Earl proclaims himself a “rapist-in-training” and promises to “smack a faggot in his shirley temple.” From the heights to the depths: hateful, malicious, terrible language compromises what could be such a unique contribution to the musical landscape.

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FREE EARL

Beware when the Free Earl movement is delivered its messiah. The prodigal son will return bearing equally the promise of legitimizing the talent of OFWGKTA and of either confirming its intent to remain steeped in vile content or refining and elevating its content. With regard to Earl’s disappearance, his narrative is quickly becoming more complex by the news cycle. His talent runs in the family: he is apparently the son of South Africa’s most beloved poet. He has sought refuge of his own volition, contrary to initial reports claiming his mother sent him away to a boot camp. And he demands his space to reflect in a way that tempts us to reconcile his and his crew’s content with some higher moral inclinations.

When we meet Earl again, we may very well meet a grown man in command of his abilities, with a voice to temper the tide. We also might well not. Regardless, for now, while Earl is on his mysterious sojourn, we’ll have to weather the fearsome affirmation of his truest premonition, as mobs of reckless journalists, gold-rushing artists, salivating businessmen, and misguided listeners kneel at the OFWGKTA altar:

“Fans’ll stand in sleet season with their fucking feet bleeding,
In hail and fucking snow, in Hell with fucking coats.”

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FIGHTING WORDS

Which is all to say…

If OFWGKTA actually has any capacity to make truly lasting, moving, edifying music, I firmly throw my gauntlet:

Let’s see how compelling your content can be when you quit resorting to your tired, crass mainstays. Let’s see what you can do to menace me artfully. Let’s see what you can make when you spend more than ten minutes on a beat. Let’s see what happens when you choose quality over quantity, when you actually try to craft art instead of vomiting gall and bile on the world.

Until then, to OFWGKTA and all the architects of their moment:

Fuck you back. I’m over it.

’01. INITIALS B.R. we have seen the moment of our greatness flicker
’02. SESAME we never sleep
‘03. STRIKE ON BACK we play with fire
‘04. HEAVYWEIGHT BULLION we buy gold
‘05. THE MUSIC MAN we are open for business
‘06. THE CONFIDENCE MAN we give you our word
‘07. HENRY DARGER we need a moment alone
‘08. WALTER SICKERT we have got to be kidding
‘09. T.R.O.B. we quit

I would love to remember my first listen to Public Enemy’s Apocalypse ’91… The Empire Strikes Black. How ridiculous is it that a 10-year-old white kid would have chosen to spend his weekly allowance on that tape of all things, that my rap-enthusiast father would have been parentally advised and eagerly complicit? There’s just no way you could slip that tape in the deck and not feel like you were encountering something that demanded a far more complex response than “this is good music”. You had to feel assaulted and discombobulated. You had to feel white and subversive, the oppressor and oppressed, guilty and guilt-less, tourist and earnest. You had to feel totally pumped. I was 10 years old and listening to this…

Public Enemy – Lost at Birth

What?! After a five-second warning/threat/promise that “The future holds nothing else but confrontation”, Public Enemy are going to ease you into this album with a band roll-call set to the sounds of demolished relics and renegade emergency vehicles. It’s diabolically ill and there’s no way I could have understood it.

What brought me to the album was this video for the single “Can’t Truss It”, which I must have seen on The Box at some point because I keep picturing it obscured by scrolling jukebox numbers…

Public Enemy – Can’t Truss it

By then, I had seen videos for “Fight the Power” and “9-1-1 Is a Joke”, but this was different. I wanted more. Once I had it, I remember obsessing over “Can’t Truss It” and pouring over the lyrics in the liner notes. I remember wishing they had made a real song out of that first track, “Lost at Birth”. I remember wondering what Arizona had to do with anything. At some point, I moved on. I think my Dad borrowed/stole the tape from me. I didn’t revisit it again until college, when I worked for Buildings & Grounds, for whom I would rake leaves and remove trash among milling peers, seething in a righteous headphone bubble, clearing the way “for the S, the S1Ws”.

A couple of years ago, I happened upon the eBay auctions for the leftover Sandbox Automatic vinyl stock and picked up the “Nighttrain” single, not even remembering that it came from Apocalypse ’91. It didn’t matter–the album track isn’t even on the single. Instead, we get the “Get Up Get Involved Throwdown Mixx”…

Public Enemy – Nighttrain (Get Up Get Involved Throwdown Mixx)

Now that is a disgusting track. Though the album version has its virtues and sits naturally in the sequence, this one slays the album version and is just about one of the gnarliest, hardest, most hectic rap hits ever. It makes me want to wild out every time I hear it. I melt for that “oohwaayoooh” cut with the pitch slider in the chorus. I assume it’s Terminator X but it may well be the man talking all over the track’s background, unmistakably responsible for the alchemy: the one and only Pete Rock, who injects the harsh PE aesthetic with some nasty funk flavor that inspires a bit more dancing than the usual headbanging. As well as it works, CL Smooth guesting on a PE track doesn’t make a whole lot of sense beyond the obvious affiliation, so I find it distracting (same thing on Run-DMC’s take on this formula, “Down with the King”). Though I prefer the “Throwdown Mixx”, the “Pete Rock Strong Island Mt. Vernon Meltdown” on the B-side is pretty hot as well…

Public Enemy – Nighttrain (Pete Rock Strong Island Mt. Vernon Meltdown)

Pete Rock also provided the remix for another Apocalypse ’91 single, “Shut Em Down”…

Public Enemy – Shut ‘Em Down
Public Enemy – Shut ‘Em Down (Pete Rock Remix)

Both beats kill. But the first sounds far more distinctly PE; the PR remix works very well but sounds like a remix. Fortunately, when Pete Rock decides to drop his typically lackluster verse, Chuck’s superiority is abundantly clear and the quality of Chuck’s voice and delivery ultimately sell the product as a whole. But the style is more music than movement, which isn’t the Public Enemy aesthetic.

All Pete Rock contributions aside, Apocalypse ’91 is an amazing album. Public Enemy has to be the craziest pop group ever assembled. A vitriolic leader, an oddball jester, a silent giant on the decks, a dancing security corps, a Department of Information, an elusive but ubiquitous production squad. It’s elaborate theater and dead serious. And then you have the music. They put “Lost at Birth”, “Nighttrain”, and “Can’t Truss It” as three of the first four tracks on the album. It’s ruthless and relentless. The PE militia might as well be punching you in the face with the speakers. You can’t remove their politics here, but I mean to celebrate statement and grandeur. How can you not miss that kind of conviction in modern rap?

I love me some Destroyer. The academic cross-referencing, the subversive simplicity, the evolving character archive, the implicit misanthropy, the lazily bilious delivery, the obvious Bowie influence, the bad taste–it’s all part of a repertoire that drips with awkward, idiosyncratic swagger. Just take a look at what Bejar submitted to Merge Records as a list of “themes alluded to or avoided” in the forthcoming Destroyer album Kaputt:

Kaputt by Malaparte, which Bejar has never read… Kara Walker, specifically the lyrics she contributed to the song “Suicide Demo for Kara Walker”… Chinatown, the neighborhood bordering on Bejar’s… Baby blue eyes… 80s Miles Davis… 90s Gil Evans… Last Tango in Paris… Nic Bragg, who played lead guitar on every song, again… Fretless bass… The hopelessness of the future of music… The pointlessness of writing songs for today… V-Drums… The superiority of poetry and plays… And what’s to become of film?… The Cocaine Addict… American Communism… Downtown, the neighborhood bordering on Bejar’s… The LinnDrum… Avalon and, more specifically, Boys and Girls… The devastated mind of JC/DC, who recorded, produced and mixed this record from fall of 2008 to spring of 2010… The back-up vocals of certain Roy Ayers and Long John Baldry tours… Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence…

I’ve been listening to the album illegally for the last couple of weeks and can’t seem to give it a rest. In it, Bejar raises his uncompromising manner for a turn towards an ’80s-infused smooth jazz-pop sound, complete with suave horns and sultry female backing vocals. And to promote the approaching release, he’s given us this video for the title track:

Amazing. The song itself has been one of my two favorite tracks on the album. The second chorus is one of the most transcendent moments in the Destroyer catalogue: “Step out of your toga and into the fog, you are a prince of the ocean.” It soars. And this video is outrageous: when the mirage evaporates as the stranded man pours a chalice full of sand into his delirious mouth; when that same man tries to drink from his chalice while he’s actually in the ocean; when a fucking whale is flying in the sky with a flock of birds; when the teenager pulls out a balloon and employs his last breath to inflate it and elevate himself into the sky!

The track that really has me proselytizing here is “Suicide Demo for Kara Walker”, which tackles America’s racial issues with the help of the aforementioned artist and Merge Score! Volume 11 curator.

Destroyer – Suicide Demo for Kara Walker

According to the quote above, Kara Walker contributed lyrics to this song, but I wonder how much? Bejar just sells it so authentically. Off the bat, the title is pretty aggressive. After the pregnant, melancholy instrumental intro, what are we to expect? “Brown paper bag, don’t stop me now. I’m on a roll.” And we’re rolling. The music itself is fantastically catchy and an outright dance hit but the hooks elude us. Instead, we’re charmed along by a wealth of precious Destroyer moments: when he asks “Is it still the Invisible Man you’re consorting with, woman?”; when he tags on the prophecied “and they will” to the accusation that “New York just wants to see you naked”; when Bejar finally gives us that singular hook, crooning “You’ve got it all…” and then sneaks in “wrong” to flip the sentiment. And on and on.

But as the lyrics develop, this is clearly a heavier song than we’re used to from Bejar. And we have Kara Walker to thank for transporting his listeners to such a place of gravity. Despite his off-the-cuff performance, he’s delivering a poignant and unsettling critique of a polarized Obama era in which the hopeful produce of black presidency are borne with the memory of strange fruit, in which the nation’s grossest prejudices populate the daylight to defy progress, where “four more years” worries for “four hundred more years” of slavery, and the ghost of Harriet Tubman instructs us in the escapist/survivalist mantra: “I look up, I see the North Star, I look up, I see the North Star.” We’re given a glimpse into might have been their collaborative process in the cryptic lines “‘Maybe or maybe not… fast forward,’ she said. ‘Maybe once the seed is sown… fast forward,’ she said. ‘This bird has flown south’ she said. ‘Don’t talk about the south,’ she said.” Is this the evidence of a real-life conversation between Walker and Bejar about the future of our country? Perhaps and surely. While I don’t expect specific answers anytime soon, it’s easy to see that’s exactly what this song is. And who cares about the details of credit when we’re stretched across such a spectrum, from despair to ecstasy? We’re expanded.

And then they let the horns loose.